About the Book

Palestinian refugees’ experience of protracted displacement is among the lengthiest in history. In her breathtaking new book, Ilana Feldman explores this community’s engagement with humanitarian assistance over a seventy-year period and their persistent efforts to alter their present and future conditions. Based on extensive archival and ethnographic field research, Life Lived in Relief offers a comprehensive account of the Palestinian refugee experience living with humanitarian assistance in many spaces and across multiple generations. By exploring the complex world constituted through humanitarianism, and how that world is experienced by the many people who inhabit it, Feldman asks pressing questions about what it means for a temporary status to become chronic. How do people in these conditions assert the value of their lives? What does the Palestinian situation tell us about the world? Life Lived in Relief is essential reading for anyone interested in the history and practice of humanitarianism today.

From Our Blog

This post is published in conjunction with the American Anthropological Association conference in San Jose. Check for other posts from the conference. By Ilana Feldman, author of Life Lived in Relief: Humanitarian Predicaments and Palestinian Refugee Politics …

About the Author

Ilana Feldman is Professor of Anthropology, History, and International Affairs at George Washington University. She is the author of Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule, 1917–1967 and Police Encounters: Security and Surveillance in Gaza under Egyptian Rule.

Reviews

"In this first comprehensive study of the oldest refugee camps in the world, Ilana Feldman provides a compelling analysis of displaced Palestinians’ politics of living. Her historical and ethnographic inquiry shows the ambiguities of international aid and the hardships as well as expectations of people still deeply affected, seventy years after the nakba, by the consequences of their expulsion from their land. Life Lived in Relief is destined to become a reference for anyone interested in the Middle East."—Didier Fassin, author of Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present

"Life Lived in Relief is an ambitious book by one of the foremost scholars of humanitarianism and Palestine. Feldman approaches humanitarianism in a completely novel way, analyzing the way one people, the Palestinians, have lived across multiple generations under a humanitarian regime. This is a formidable work."—Lori Allen, author of The Rise and Fall of Human Rights: Cynicism and Politics in Occupied Palestine

"With exemplary care and commitment, Ilana Feldman examines the longue durée of temporary solutions and the persistent predicament of Palestinian refugees. Life Lived in Relief provides the definitive account of this defining humanitarian experience." —Peter Redfield, author of Life in Crisis: The Ethical Journey of Doctors Without Borders

"This epic historical ethnography of humanitarian life and practice in Palestinian refugee camps confirms Ilana Feldman as a leading scholar of humanitarianism. Life Lived in Relief gives us brilliant insights into the temporality of humanitarian living, as punctuated and oscillating, as changing but never linear. Feldman also rewrites the debates on the politics of humanitarianism, showing that refugees are always engaged in altering their worlds, even if these do not appear as radical breaks with the present. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in Palestinian lives and futures, the dilemmas and promises of humanitarianism, and the nature of politics." —Miriam Ticktin, author of Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France